Instant Messaging Wars
By Lincoln D. Stein
The fun thing about killer applications is that nobody ever expects them. When an industry pundit touts his or her vision of the Next Big Thing, you can almost always rely on it being underwhelming when (and if) it actually arrives—think VRML, active agents, and server push. Meanwhile some college kid or grad student whips up the real killer app in a dorm room, releases it to the world, and it becomes an overnight sensation.
That's what happened with music sharing. Just a year and a half ago, Sean Fanning came up with the Napster peer-to-peer protocol to make music sharing easy. Almost overnight, Napster built a clientele of more than 20 million users and spawned a horde of imitators. Although Napster itself may fade away, the victim of a centralized search architecture that's vulnerable to legal challenges, music swapping continues with full vigor. A notable aspect of killer apps is that once they're released, they can't be put back into the bottle.
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Online Resources" for a list of technologies and articles covered in this article.
Have to Have It
Instant Messaging (IM) is another killer application. America Online (AOL), seeking a middle ground between the traditional chat room's public free-for-all and email's time delays, struck on two simple user interface tweaks that together transformed Internet communication. First, AOL created a buddy list that alerted subscribers when their friends came online.
